DIPC10: Chemistry for all and surprising uses of light

2010/10/01 Roa Zubia, Guillermo - Elhuyar Zientzia

• Kimika
• Fisika

Yesterday were held in a room of the Kursaal of San Sebastian the informative talks of the fourth day of the congress Passion for Knowledge. The speakers were two Nobel laureates and one musician: chemist Roald Hoffmann, physicist Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and composer Luis de Pablo.

Roald Hoffmann, of Polish origin, has lived in the United States since childhood, leaving Europe a few years after World War II. In 1981 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research to explain the mechanisms of various organic reactions. Yesterday's lecture was about chemistry in general. However, he associated chemistry, art, industry and many other human activities.

She studied the expectations of a person who is not an expert in chemistry and explained that chemistry is closely related to the tension generated by opposing concepts. Complexity and simplicity. What is in nature and what is not. Beneficial and harmful substances. There are many other examples of tension couples that Hoffmann used to offer an agile, entertaining and sometimes fun view of chemistry.

The Algerian Claude Cohen-Tannoudji is an original Sephardic, but he has developed and is developing his professional career in France. In 1997 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing techniques of cooling and capturing atoms. And precisely in his intervention he presented this type of advanced techniques.

It started from the mention that we are celebrating the tenth anniversary of the DIPC, which also mentioned another three years. It is 60 years since the publication that the optical impulse was possible, that is, with polarized photons the matter can be physically pushed, 50 years since the development of the first laser and 15 years since the first time in the laboratory the condensate Bose-Einstein, a new physical state of matter.

The three discoveries have to do with Tannoudji's work and the interaction between light and matter. Amazing things can be done with lasers that emit polarized light and Tannoudji made a wide explanation of the most important ones. He spoke of atomic clocks, of experiments carried out from the absolute zero of temperature, etc. The Nobel Prize presented a hard work field and imagination of physicists.